Beam Cottage has been a lifetime in the making. Lillie Flynn has long been part of her brother Johnny’s backing band, the Sussex Wit, but they have been making music together for as long as they can remember. Maybe that was singing along to their father’s Paul Simon records in the car or strumming a guitar in the front room of their childhood home – Beam Cottage in Hampshire.
It was there, under the low ceilings and thatched roof, that Lillie and Johnny spent a decade of their young lives before Johnny went away to boarding school, before the family moved to Pembrokeshire, and before cancer took their father Eric from them when he was only 62.
This is the spirit which drives Beam Cottage, a record about family, love, and the joy of making music together. Intimate, raw, it has the feel of a singalong in front of the fire. The record opens with a new song from Johnny, ‘The Music of the Spheres’, and also includes Lille’s very personal composition, ‘Brockwell Park’, but much of this record is made up of covers of songs they remember from childhood, or of reimaginings of songs from Johnny’s extensive back catalogue.
‘The Ghost of O’Donahue’, which first appeared on Johnny’s debut with the Sussex Wit, 2008’s A Larum, is given a haunting makeover featuring South African group The Joy, a nod to their South African mum Caro. ‘Been Listening’, from the 2011 album of the same name, and ‘The Lady is Risen’ from 2013’s Country Mile are re-recorded as duets matching Johnny’s rich baritone with Lille’s alto.
There is an eclectic mix of covers, from Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer’s ‘Moon River’ to Billy Bragg’s ‘Between The Wars’ – written during the miners’ strike but still resonant today. The standout is their dark take on Paul Simon’s ‘The Boy In The Bubble’. Fittingly, two days after they had recorded it, Johnny got a phone call to confirm he had been cast as Simon in Bill Condon’s upcoming historical drama The Road Home, a biopic of South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela, an anti-apartheid campaigner who split with many in the movement to take part in the creation of Simon’s record Graceland – on which the original of this song appeared.
The record finishes with ‘Sleepy Head’, a lullaby written by their father and sung to them when they shared a bedroom as small children. Somewhere along the way some of the lyrics were forgotten, but Lillie used to sing it to Johnny’s daughter Ida, and they have now recorded it the way Ida remembers it – carrying on the musical journey of the family.